Among the products earmarked for closure in the "spring clean" is Aardvark, the search company acquired by Google for $50m (£31m) last year.

Google Desktop will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support. Other products to be shut down include news browsing experiment Fast Flip, the Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Notebook, Image labeller, Subscribed links and Sidewiki.

In a blog posting last Friday, Google senior vice president Alan Eustace said: "Technology improves, people's needs change, some bets pay off and others don't. So, as Larry previewed on our last earnings call, we're having a fall spring-clean at Google.

"Over the next few months we'll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products - the ones that improve the lives of billions of people.

"All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products. As for our users, we'll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them."

Google is expected to transfer significant resources over to Google+, its bold new social networking service launched in an invitation-only beta in June. According to calculations by Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen, 18 million users tried out the service within the first three weeks of the beta. It is expected that Google+ will go live to all users in the first half of 2012.

In the blog posting, Eustace added: "We've never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won't change. We'll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential. But by targeting our resources more effectively, we can focus on building world-changing products with a truly beautiful user experience."

In a goodbye blog last Friday, Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla said: "We [have] learned a lot about creating and maintaining online communities, and how to facilitate sharing of knowledge between people. We've been excited to share these lessons within Google over the past year, especially as part of the effort behind Google+.

"It has been gratifying to see how well this project is doing - even in these early stages, Google+ has already become a great place to share knowledge online, eclipsing the original vark.com! - and there is much more to come very soon. In this and other projects at Google, the Aardvark team remains committed to developing powerful tools for connecting people and improving access to information."